How Node.js Got Big

November 21st, 2013

How the wunderkind framework grew up, from the perspective of one of its earliest contributors.

Today Node.js is a hot topic. It’s the server side programming environment de rigueur for fast, lightweight development. But that hasn’t always been the case. Node.js inventor Ryan Dahl, saw Node.js as a personal experiment more than anything else. Developers scoffed at the idea of JavaScript, a formerly strictly client-side language, running on the server side.